I have written about this nice Canadian software already before on my website, but there is a new version out now (version 2.2), I would like to draw your attention to.

CQPhone has an excellent sound and a video that can be zoomed up to full view on your monitor.It is freeware. Download is on CQPhone. It comes without any ads or spyware.

What is so very special with CQPhone: Every user has an own CQPhone number. You must keep this number secret and give it out only to special people. So you can run the program on the background, and while being online and working on the computer, you are available only for those who are always allowed ;-) to disturb you.

Ever wondered what other women have in their handbags? My friend Pati started a nice game on Blogger.com. The first women take already part, showing the contents of their handbags. The game started in Portuguese, but there are also first entries in English and German.

If you like the idea and are in the mood for taking part, send a picture to Pati at jogodabolsa/2005(at)foto(dot)arcor(dot)de (substitute the "at" and the "dot"s) with a photo of bag and its contents, name, country, your website, and text (or the link to your blog with the entry).http://home.arcor.de/jogodabolsa/part.htm

Last Thursday rydel23 started a discussion on the 60th anniversary of Liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. I have followed the discussion with interest, now and then having the impression of huge hate towards Germans. I would have been able to understand that, if the authors of these entries were old people, but i was astonished at seeing such anti-German and anti-Russian opinions among young people, who were born already in the next generation after me. ( Read more...Collapse )They have discussed Auschwitz in that thread. This is good and OK. One must never forget what happened and what people are capable of in the name of an ideology.

But those who poured out about the bad and repulsive Germans, and their hate towards Germans - indeed, those haven't understood anything ...

An ICQ friend opened a shop: www.mobilschmuck.com. When I saw the cute "Fashion girls" and "Dreaming friends", I counted my friends and relatives who love their mobile phones - and became his first customer! :-)

Some time ago I mentioned IntelliSpeech, the pronounciation trainer of the digitalpublishing.de language learning software. The other day I saw an online demo on their site: digitalpublishing.de demo (Flash). Below, the menu of this flash demo is clickable. Go to "Aussprache" and you get the idea. :-)

I was right - see here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/53231The faked telekom mail is spreading a trojan. The URL which is to lead to the Telekom bill, in the first frame is loading a Telekom login site, in the second (invisible) frame, however, the site is trying to install a trojan!

About the same time I got in touch twice with avatars - a nice and playful feature. I believe in a way it can make internet a bit more funny.

One occasion is the program WebGaito from the Gaito website, a nice software that lets you create an avatar for your website just in minutes. If only for private use, this software, including various avatar dolls, is free - and fun! (Free version without voice.) I have already made a few ones for a yahoo group (GermanLanguageClub), for instance the Jack-O´-Lantern pumpkin reciting the Erl-King, and the last by now is a little rabbit explaining German idioms like "sich etwas hinter die Ohren schreiben". It is fun!

About the same time a friend invited me to virtual zones (www.vzones.com). It was a little nice adventure, although, to be honest, in the first hours there I felt totally lost. If by mistake or by default, I had a male body. Hmm - well, not necessarily what I would want! Anyway, Maxie, at least for the time being, enjoys her virtual visits to the NH world. If you would like to see her on her world trip - I made a quick gallery with IrfanView, showing Maxie at some of the most beautiful places in the world. :-)

I was wondering today when I opened my in-mail box. Why would Telekom send me online bills now?The mail was looking perfect - not the usual machine translated crap where you can tell at first glance that it is spam. But just out of curiosity I checked the header: Voilá! The sender's origin IP was 210.61.203.86 - this is somewhere in China. And when checking the given link where I am to get my online bill, it is not Telekom again, but ntuaa-dfw.org/t-com/rechnung/. This is somewhere in the USA!

Usually I would forward phishing spam: paypal password fishing to spoof@paypal.com, ebay phishing to spoof@ebay.com, this works.

As I have the feeling that this is a new wave, I went to the website of Telekom in order to find a similar address for crime prevention there. Phew! Does somebody know it? They have a usual info@telekom.de, of which I am sure that hardly ever someone there will read mail that is sent to that address, the less a mail indicating spam. And for any other cases they hide themselves behind a contact form !!!

Now try sending a mail including the necessary header information in a contact form! One could, but it is much copying and pasting I am not in the mind for.

I wonder - in which world does Telekom live? Why don't they provide an email address for such cases?Haven't they ever heard about PayPal, EBay, CitiBank, Deutsche Bank frauds?

Or is it just the arrogant ignorance of a big company who thinks they are safe - until there are first victims and losses? It would not concern them when my details are misused by somebody elsewhere in the world, would it?

If I am right and this was not meant for me alone, then I wonder what will happen to those who visit that site ...

Being in a bookshop not so long ago, I saw a language learning software with voice-recognition developed by digitalpublishing (Munich). A demo CD-ROM was available, so I took one.

Wow! An inbuilt software called Intellispeech helps you to train an almost accent-free pronounciation: You have to repeat a word after the video tutor, and if you fail and your output is not at least 80 per cent similar to the tutor's pronounciation, the word is repeated for a second, or even a third, try. Then you go on to the next word.

After such a course you still won't speak a language like a native speaker, because this requires much more than the correct pronounciation of single words. But it is a beginning. I wonder how e-learning will look like in 5 years ...

I know, I know, a LiveJournal is for writing, and I haven't written anything for a while, but I have been so busy ... It is the little steps and the little success that takes you forward, isn't it? I learned a lot in the last time - for instance, I can make PDFs with freeware now. I learned something more about flash. I have re-partitioned the hard disk of my windows machine without any data loss (something I never did before, and I did have some heart-beating while the hard-disk was re-partitioned :-)). And I got the router working for both the windows and the linux computer ... Nothing special for the computer freaks here, but something new for me and I take some little pride in it that I managed it without any external help. :-)

I have bought a tablet (WACOM) and found that this is quite a good thing! Instead of your mouse you take a pencil for navigating. But also one can draw on that tablet and the drawing appears on the screen. The tablet came with a bundle of software, of which I like the COREL Painter Classic most. Gosh, what a variety of pencils and brushes! Besides it supports translucence of the colors and offers various nice effects (lightings and so on).

If you ever think about buying a tablet - I highly recommend you to get it! It takes only a bit time until you are used to it, but then it is easy to handle. Probably it could also help you to prevent "tennis arm" and carpal tunnel syndrome ...

Three of the best hints given on that Russian website I mentioned in my previous entry.

Looking for a word on a website:Mozilla has a search feature under "Edit" (search for a word while you type, search for a link while you type). The short key is "/" and "'". So being on a website and looking for a word, I simply type "/thatword" into my keyboard. This is amazingly quick!

Changing the size of the text:Sometimes, the text on a website is just too small to read - or too big. With Ctrl and + or - you can change the size.

Favicon:I must try that - make a gif an animated favicon and watch it on a Mozilla-like browser ... :-)

Mozilla is really not new to me, and I am enjoying some features, which are missing in IE (first of all, of course, the tabbed browsing, but also some that show additional information about a website). However, this Russian site